


Waiting

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Anxiety, Cassian is unconscious and in bacta but definitely alive, F/M, Fix-It, Jyn is full of emotions and desires, Pining, Post-Battle of Scarif, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Worry, and either this is love or I know it not, trying to work out what she wants and realising things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 15:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12015351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Just before blacking out on the rescue shuttle he said something.  His lips moved and formed some word; three syllables, possibly four.  But no sound came, he was too near to losing all breath forever by that moment; and she’s never learned to read lips.  Cassian fainted and she may never know what he was trying to say, with his eyes fixed on her, in the moment of knowing they were both saved.She cannot stop thinking about him.





	Waiting

She cannot stop thinking about his lips. 

He isn’t thinking about hers; but then, sedated to unconsciousness, he can’t think about anything anyway, and before he went into surgery, in his brief seconds of awareness the chances are he had only the dimmest sense even of still being alive.  He’s floating, eyes peacefully shut, immersed in bacta, post-operative, in recovery.  _Recovery_.  He has to recover. 

Dark hair drifts around his face; around what she can see of it, anyway.  Closed eyes, bruised forehead, a deep cut across one brow, with two stitches across it like lines drawn in blackest ink.  The tender rim of each ear, delicate as the curve of a shell.  His jaw, all lean lines, his too-thin cheeks, tan skin looking pale under the scrappy beard.  The muscles of his neck, and his body.  But the rest of his face is obscured by the breathing mask; that crooked nose and firm chin, his moustache and his mouth.  And Jyn cannot leave.  She cannot stop thinking.

Just before blacking out on the rescue shuttle he said something.  His lips moved and formed some word; three syllables, possibly four.  But no sound came, he was too near to losing all breath forever by that moment; and she’s never learned to read lips.  Cassian fainted and she may never know what he was trying to say, with his eyes fixed on her, in the moment of knowing they were both saved.

She cannot stop thinking about him.  His lips, his eyes.  That downturned, weary mouth, that can smile so suddenly and sweetly, that can go soft as a child’s in pain or regret.  They are thin lips, very finely shaped; it’s a subtle mouth, a thinker’s mouth, controlled, cautious.  She’s seen him angry and despairing, has seen his eyes suddenly hopeful, seen them full of longing; and shut in misery, and wide in astonished gratitude.  Such beauty in his exhausted face.  Such a soul in his gaze, such a voice on his lips.  When he began to lean down to her, in the elevator, she almost stretched up, almost pressed herself to him; but he looked so broken, so close to falling yet again, and she’d feared he might not be able to move any further if that happened, known she just about had the strength to help him stay afoot, but not to raise him up bodily from the ground.  So they’d hovered, hanging in the moment, looking at one another; saying nothing, barely breathing for pain and shock.  Success should have felt more joyful than this but how could she feel joy with Cassian just clinging on to life in front of her?  Every breath left him shaking, slowly crumpling in on himself.

But she should have kissed him.  Then, or on the beach, somewhere on that journey across the last few minutes before the threshold of death she should have kissed him on the mouth, she should have let him know.  Or in the ship, when he lay on the cold deck staring up at her, too weak to move; before he tried to speak and his eyes slid shut, she should have kissed him.  And she hadn’t.

Jyn can dimly remember wanting to kiss someone before.  The shivery feeling inside when you look at them, the way you think of them endlessly, the way she is thinking now; the way desire makes you stupid, makes you quiver like a leaf or a winter-flower, trembling all the time.  The elevated heart-rate and the tendency to breathe too fast.  Sensations like fire and spice and bliss on the skin if they touch your arm by accident.  The horrible, humiliating physicality of all that wanting.

But it was years ago, the wanting; and it was so seldom fulfilled.  She looks back on it with shame and something akin to disgust.  Her hormonal adolescent self, enflamed with longing for one or another of her comrades in the cadre, or one or another of the holo-novela actors they watched on the quiet, huddled around someone’s data-pad, screening a channel she or Maia had sliced for a joke and kept for a thrill.  Wanting, wanting, wanting, and being reduced to mere overwhelming animal need by your wanting; by wanting that would never, ever be met.  Hopeless, unfillable desire.

And hearing this same feeling, this humiliation through desire, called love in the holos; thinking she understood, thinking _This is why Saw says love is for fools and cowards_.

She hasn’t _wanted_ to kiss anyone for over six years now.  A kiss has been just another bargaining tool.  A kiss, a knife, a piece of information; I’ll work for you, I’ll get you what you need, I’ll hurt you or make nice with you.  Her limited options in life, and the limits that in turn they imposed.  She’s been able to keep from outright whoring herself, but there have been times when the “I’ll make nice” option has needed to go further than she would like, or the bargain built round it would fail.  Not quite whoring, though; just as finding a mark with a pleasant face and a healthy body when she needed a safe bed for the night in a dark place was not quite whoring, either.

But it wasn’t love.  This, impossible, insane, insanely alive, this is love.

She cannot stop thinking about Cassian’s words; about his fire, and his sadness, about the way he’s spoken to her, the way he’s met her eyes, the way he’s moved in time and in tune with her, stayed close to her, smiled at her, chosen her.  The way he’s trusted her, simply because she asked him to, and spoken the word hope, unsolicited, to her who has had none for all these years.  His own hope, his own trust, given to her without mockery. 

All the things he’s said, and all the acts that have spoken as loud as any word.  The way he stared at her hand on his sleeve, and blushed.  The way he came through for her, came back for her, the thing no-one else has ever done in twenty years.

She should have told him.  That idiot desire of adolescence is a distant embarrassment now.  Those unwanted man-handlings that kept her under someone’s protection or part of someone’s team are forgotten.  This is now, the day they survived, and this is a new reality.  She wants it to last. 

Her own wounds, the cracked ribs, sprained knee, slashed calf muscle, the cuts and bruises on her face and hands, have been tended.  She’s been cleaned and bandaged and bacta’d, and discharged.  Cassian is receiving the best care available and all she can do is wait. 

She presses her fingers to the duraglass of the tank, gazing up at him as he floats in the healing fluid.  New scars running into and across older ones, stitches from the surgery yesterday.  A massive skein of bruises, violet and ochre, wrapped round his torso.  Fine dark body hair running down his midriff; firm muscles relaxed in unconsciousness; nipples that look naked and strange in the blueish tinged light of the tank. Those calm dark eyes, closed, and lashes like crow-feathers against his skin.  How wise and helpless he looks.  She should have told him.  She should have kissed him when she had the chance.  That mask is wrapped over his face, hiding him from her, its mechanical breath forced into his mouth.  What if she leaves, and the respirator fails? - what if they got here too late, if the treatment isn’t enough?  What if she never sees him alive again? 

She wants to flatten herself against the glass.  Not for herself but to tell him, to be there when he wakes ( _he has to wake_ ), to show him, to say yes, I am here, I came for you, I will not leave you, just as you would not leave me.  Not just once but again and again, for as long as you need me to, I’m here, I’m staying, I’m not going anywhere, and here is my hope, my trust, alive again because of you.  Here I am, alive and yours.

To tell him these things, and ask him what he was trying to tell her, on the ship.  To touch those battered, strong hands.  To see that broken face unmasked again, and open before her, see his eyes full of emotion as they were in the elevator, open wide, joyful and sorrowful all at once and beyond all measure.  To see him and touch him and tell him, and to kiss him. 

Jyn waits.


End file.
